August 10, 2009

Lovliest of Trees

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since, to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

by A. E. Housman

May 2, 2009

Spring Has Sprung

After all the cold days, the inches of snow, and frigid winds, here we are seemingly at the beginning again. A new season of growing. The snow has melted. The ground is thawing. The garlic we planted on a damp, gray late October afternoon is pushing up through its thick blanket of straw.

Spring isn't all hope and promise and growth. There's the accounting and reckoning too. The bees didn't survive this winter in our hives. We didn't close up the hives right after we discovered the loss, and on a warm day you would almost think the hives were still alive with the amount of other bees coming and going -- robbing our dead hives of their hard earned honey stores.

So there's renewal in Spring, and some death too. There's also a lot of glamorless management. This weekend I pruned the raspberries, and started in on the apple trees. For weeks to come we'll be collecting the blowing, swirling trash that follows the melting of the snow. There are bricks to dig out of the dirt, paths to re-establish, and compost bins to prop up. But for now, on these first warm days when the sun waits to sink below the horizon until well into the evening, Spring is about the garlic finally poking up through the straw and how that signifies the promise of growth and warmth and harvest and continuing.